Excel Basics: Working with Spreadsheets

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1 Excel Basics: Working with Spreadsheets E 890 / 1 Unravel the Mysteries of Cells, Rows, Ranges, Formulas and More Spreadsheets are all about numbers: they help us keep track of figures and make calculations. That makes them very useful, but also rather intimidating, and most spreadsheet programs look decidedly off-putting when you start them up: just a big, blank grid! In this article, I ll introduce you to the basics of using spreadsheets, explaining all the important terms with exercises you can follow to familiarise yourself with spreadsheets. Although I ll concentrate on Microsoft Excel, most of these basics apply to whatever spreadsheet program you happen to be using. By Rob Young Microsoft Excel Microsoft Works The Layout of a Spreadsheet: Cells, Rows and Columns... A Quick Exercise: Adding a List of Numbers... Formulas: Get Your Spreadsheet to Make Instant Calculations for You... E 890 / 4 E 890 / 5 E 890 / 8 This article shows you:... When and why spreadsheets are useful... How To find your way around a spreadsheet... How To enter and total-up lists of figures 33

2 E 890 / 2 Use spreadsheets to store, add up or compare lists of numbers Spreadsheets add numbers automatically What Makes Spreadsheets Useful, and Why Would I Use One? Do you ever make a list of numbers on a piece of paper or in a notebook? If so, you ve created a spreadsheet. It s a rather old-fashioned one, but as long as you can read what you ve written, it s no worse than a computer-based spreadsheet. You must have made this list of numbers for a reason, though. Was it to add them all up? Or to keep for future reference? Or to compare with another, similar list? There s always a reason for making a list of numbers, and whatever that reason is, you ll find it easier and more reliable to use a spreadsheet program rather than a pen and paper. Why? Here are four quick reasons: You can replace one number with another quickly and cleanly no scribbling out! The program will add up the numbers for you automatically (and always correctly). If you need to do other calculations, such as subtraction, division, or working out an average, the program handles those just as easily. If you change a number or add another to the list, the program will instantly update its total, taking the new number into account. The spreadsheet is a file stored on your PC, so whenever you need to refer to it or alter it, you just open it up like any other document. Let s go to a quick example of a spreadsheet in action. In the screenshot below, I ve entered a list of three numbers and told the program to add them up. (I ll explain how I did that a little later, after we ve covered the first few of our basics.) 34

3 E 890 / 3 Later, I decide that one of my figures is wrong: the 600 should actually be 500, so I need to change it. I click in the box where I typed 600, type in 500 and press the Enter key, and I m done: the program instantly updates the total. If I d done this on paper, I would have had to scribble out two numbers and do my adding-up again, or make a new list. If you change a number, the total updates straight away When you know a little about what spreadsheets do, you can probably start to see a few ways you could put them to good use, but here are some suggestions: Managing accounts: one list of numbers keeps a running total of everything you ve earned in a month, and another tracks everything you ve spent. You can even add a calculation to show you the difference between the two totals whether or not you re currently in profit. Sports statistics: if you re a sports fan, use a spreadsheet to keep track of your team s performance each season: wins, losses, points, goals scored and conceded. Budgeting: if you re planning a holiday, building an extension, or landscaping the garden, use a spreadsheet to enter estimated costs for each separate element, see the total, and compare it with your budget. Spreadsheets have plenty of day-to-day uses 35

4 E 890 / 4 Expense tracking: if you use a car for workrelated trips, use a spreadsheet to keep track of each trip and the mileage covered. The spreadsheet can multiply the total by a priceper-mile to tell you at a glance what expenses you should claim. The only thing these suggestions have in common is that they involve lists of numbers: money, scores, distances, points, and so on. Any other list of numbers is an equally-good candidate for a spreadsheet. Excel is one of many spreadsheet programs All spreadsheets look the same Rows are numbered, columns have letters The Layout of a Spreadsheet: Cells, Rows and Columns Microsoft Excel is the most popular spreadsheet program (and the one you ll see pictured in this article s screenshots), followed by the simpler spreadsheet built into Microsoft Works. You may well have one of these, or you may have one of the dozens of other spreadsheet programs: Lotus 1-2-3, Calc, Quattro Pro, among others. Whichever spreadsheet you use, you ll see much the same thing when you start it up: a big grid of empty white boxes. We don t call them boxes, because that would be too easy: we call them cells. The whole grid is known as a worksheet. Running along the top of the cells you ll see the letters A, B, C and so on. These are the column headers, and they give each column a name: the column of cells on the left is column A, the column beside it is column B, etc. Running down the extreme left of the grid are the row headers containing numbers: the top row of cells is row 1, the second row down is row 2, and so on. 36

E 890 / 5 If you re familiar with the game Battleships, you ve probably guessed how these letters and numbers work: by combining a column letter and a row number, we can give each cell a name.

5 E 890 / 5 If you re familiar with the game Battleships, you ve probably guessed how these letters and numbers work: by combining a column letter and a row number, we can give each cell a name. The cell in the top left corner is cell A1, the cell to its right is B1; find the cell in column E on row 4 and you re at cell E4. Although it may seem sensible to call this the name of a cell, we actually call it the cell reference. Each cell is named after the column and row it s in This is column B This is row 2 This is cell B2 This is the cell selector, currently at cell D6 Whenever we refer to particular cells, we always do it using the letter first. For example, the cell in the top left corner is always called A1, and never 1A. You ll probably also see that one of the cells has a thick box around it. This box is called the cell selector, and it shows which cell is currently selected. If you were to type something, it would appear in the cell indicated by the cell selector. You can click any cell to move the cell selector there, or you can use the four arrow keys on your keyboard to move the cell selector left, right, up or down. (In the screenshot above, I clicked in cell D6, so that s where the cell selector appears.) Click a cell to select it, or use the keyboard A Quick Exercise: Adding a List of Numbers On page 3 of this article I showed you a short spreadsheet calculation. Let s run through the steps to make that list of numbers and then add them up: 37

6 E 890 / 6 1. Start your spreadsheet program. When it appears on the screen, you should see a blank grid of cells (or worksheet ). If you don t, choosing File > New will make one appear in most programs. 2. Click in cell B1, and the cell selector should appear around that cell. 3. Type the number 100 and press Enter. 4. As soon as you pressed the Enter key, the cell selector probably moved to the cell below, cell B2. If it didn t, click in cell B2. 5. Now type the number 300 into cell B2 and press Enter. 6. Now the cell selector should be in cell B3. Again, if it isn t, click in cell B3. Add a label for the row containing the total 7. Type the number 600 and press Enter. 8. Now click in cell A4, and type Total:. (This is a label an ordinary piece of text that reminds us what a certain row or column contains.) So far, the result should look similar to the next screenshot. Press Enter again. 9. Now click in cell B4, and this is where we make our spreadsheet do something useful add up our numbers. Type this into cell B4: =SUM(B1+B2+B3) 38

7 E 890 / 7 In some programs (Excel, for example), while you re typing the line above, you may see tooltips and coloured hints appear nearby. The program is trying to be helpful and suggest things you might want, but just ignore all this and keep typing. 10.Make sure you ve typed the text exactly as it is shown in step 9. Note that it starts with an equals sign, and it doesn t have any spaces at all. After checking it, press Enter. 11. What happens? Well, if all went well, the strange stuff you just typed into cell B4 should disappear, and instead you should see the number That strange stuff tells the program to add the numbers we typed into the first three cells and show the total in this cell. This cell now displays the total If you think you made a mistake in step 9, or your program has shown an error message, you can type it in again: just click in cell B4 again and type the line shown in step 9. It will automatically replace what you typed there earlier. 12.Now try experimenting with different numbers in cells B1, B2 and B3. For instance, click in cell B3 (which currently contains 600 ), and type 500 then press Enter. Straight away you should see the total change to 900. If you change a number, the total is recalculated 39

8 E 890 / 8 A formula tells the spreadsheet to calculate a result Formulas must start with an equals sign Formulas: Get Your Spreadsheet to Make Instant Calculations For You I referred to it as strange stuff, but there s a more technical term for what we typed in step 9: it s called a formula. Whenever you want a spreadsheet to work something out and display the result, you ll use a formula to do it. The most important thing to remember about formulas is that they must start with an equals sign (=). It s this that tells the program it has to work something out: if you type something into a cell without an equals sign at the beginning, the program just displays what you typed. (We saw that in action when we typed 100,300, 600 and the text Total: none of those began with an equals sign, so the program just displayed them.) When a cell contains a formula, the program does the mathematics in that formula, and then displays the result in the cell where the formula was. Now it s time to explain the formula we just used, which was: =SUM(B1+B2+B3) The equals sign, tells the program it must treat what follows as a calculation to be solved. The word SUM means do the arithmetic that follows. SUM is one of many functions built into spreadsheet programs, but it s the one you ll use most as it does adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Your program may offer dozens of functions for adding or comparing dates and times, doing trigonometry, calculating distributions, and all sorts of other things I failed at school. If you press the F1 key to open the program s help, then search for 40

9 E 890 / 9 functions, you should be able to find a list of them. You probably won t need any but SUM though, so for most purposes you can assume that your formulas will always start with =SUM. After the word SUM comes the arithmetic we want to do, always in brackets. We wanted to add the contents of the three cells at the top of column B, so we tell the program to do just that: B1+B2+B3. Always use cell references in your formulas You ll notice that our formula didn t say : we didn t enter the numbers we want to add up, but the cell references containing the numbers. This is the second important point to remember about formulas: you should avoid typing real numbers into them whenever you can. When we tell the program to add B1+B2+B3 it will keep watch on those cells and make sure it always shows us what they add up to, even if we change a number in one of the cells. On the other hand, if we had written this for our formula: Always make formulas refer to cells, not to real numbers =SUM( ) it would always give us the result In fact, we d have wasted our time typing anything into those first three cells, because this formula doesn t use those cells at all! Use Cell Ranges to Add a Large Number of Cells In the example we were just using, we were adding up three cells, B1, B2 and B3. Imagine if we were adding up 20, 50 or 1000 cells this way: would you really have to type the references to all those cells in your formula? 41

10 E 890 / 10 No, fortunately not. Spreadsheets provide a handy shorthand method of entering chains of cells: these are called cell ranges. 42 Specify a range with the first cell, a colon, and the last cell Change a cell by clicking it and typing something different You can edit a cell containing a formula in the Formula Bar A range is a way of saying everything from this cell to that cell, and it looks like this: =SUM(B1:B3) That s the shorthand way of writing the formula we used earlier: add up everything from cell B1 to cell B3, inclusive. In this example it only saves a tiny bit of typing, but if we wanted to add up everything from B1 down to B480, it would be a huge timesaver: =SUM(B1:B480) How To Edit Cells in a Spreadsheet I explained earlier how you can easily change the number shown in a cell: just click that cell, type a different number and press Enter. The same is true if the cell contains a label (ordinary text 'Total:' which we added previously) just click the cell and type something different. There will be times when you don t want to type something different, perhaps, you just want to make a small change to what s already there. A prime example is a formula: if you have to edit a formula, you d rather not type the whole thing again. No problem: another option is to use the Formula Bar. In most programs, including Excel and Works, this is immediately above the column headers, as shown in the next screenshot. When you select any cell, the Formula Bar shows you the cell reference on the left, and what that cell contains on the right. In the screenshot, I ve clicked in cell B4: the Formula Bar confirms that on the left, and on the right it shows the formula

E 890 / 11 we re using in that cell. If you wanted to edit that formula, you d click in the Formula Bar, change the formula as required, and then press Enter.

11 E 890 / 11 we re using in that cell. If you wanted to edit that formula, you d click in the Formula Bar, change the formula as required, and then press Enter. Click a cell, and you can edit its formula in the Formula Bar Here are a few other editing tips: To delete the contents of a cell, select the required cell and press the Delete key. If you want to select a collection of cells that are all connected to each other, press the mouse button down in one cell and drag the mouse (keeping the button down) until all the cells you wanted have been highlighted. To select cells that are scattered about in different places on your worksheet, click one cell, then hold down the Ctrl key and click each of the others you want. (If you select a wrong cell by mistake, keep the Ctrl key down and click it again.) To select an entire column, click that column s header (such as the C header to select the whole of column C). Likewise, you can select a whole row by clicking its row header. If you need to make a column wider, move the mouse up to the column header and position it at the join between that column and the one to its right, as shown in the next screenshot: the mouse pointer turns into a vertical bar crossed by an arrow. You can now click and drag to the right until it s wide enough. Alternatively, just You can empty selected cells with the Delete key Select cells by dragging or by holding Ctrl and clicking You can stretch columns that are too narrow 43

12 E 890 / 12 double-click the join, and the column will be widened just enough to display the widest thing that column has to display. To widen a column, find the join in the header and either drag or double-click You can lay out a spreadsheet as you like Keep these suggestions in mind How To Design Your Spreadsheet If you ve decided to use a spreadsheet for a particular purpose, you re probably wondering how to start. Well, the first rule about designing a spreadsheet is that there aren t really any rules! That big grid of cells is like an artist s canvas: you don t have to start anywhere in particular, and you certainly don t need to fill it all. In fact, leaving rows and columns empty can make it easier to read and understand. Although there aren t any rules, here are a few guidelines to work from: Use text labels as headings to tell you what each column or cell contains. Decide what labels you need before you start (as you probably would if you wrote a table on a piece of paper), and enter all your labels before adding any figures. Use bold and/or coloured text to highlight the most important cells (usually totals) and make them easy to find at a glance. Try to think ahead and leave enough space for numbers and formulas you ll add later. Let s compare two versions of the same spreadsheet. This is tracking someone s monthly 44

13 E 890 / 13 expenses. It includes labels for each category of expense we want to track (car, house and food), and labels for each month of the year. In column E we re adding up the total spent each month, and in row 7 we re adding up how much we ve spent in each category so far this year. In cell E7 we add up the total expenses this year, either by totting up cells E2 down to E6, or cells B7, C7 and D7 (either calculation should give the same result). There are two things wrong with this example. First, it isn t very well presented. If it s only for your own use, you may not mind, but a little colour and style can make it easier on the eye. Your spreadsheet program s toolbar should offer options to set the style, text colour and background colour of cells (just like those you find in your word processor ) and it s worth taking advantage of them. The second problem is that there s no forward planning. Where will the figures for the rest of the year go? What happens if you need to add another column for a new category of expenses? In the next screenshot, I ve spruced up the style a little, but more importantly I ve prepared for the future: I ve included rows and labels for the Text styles and colours make a spreadsheet more readable Plan for the future by labelling all the rows and columns you ll need 45

E 890 / 14 remaining months of the year, ready to add those figures when they re available, and I ve left columns E and F blank in case I think of any more types of expenses I want to add later.

14 E 890 / 14 remaining months of the year, ready to add those figures when they re available, and I ve left columns E and F blank in case I think of any more types of expenses I want to add later. If you forget to think ahead, it s not a huge problem: you can insert extra rows or columns when you need to. Click a column header or a row header (depending on whether you want to add a column or a row), then go to your spreadsheet program s Insert menu and you should see an option to insert a column or a row. The new row or column will usually be inserted before the one you selected. At the same time, the program should automatically update your formulas to make sure they still refer to the same cells as they did before. 46

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